Availability-Aware Service Chain Provisioning with Sub-chain-enabled Coordinated Protection

This paper proposes a sub-chain-enabled coordinated protection model for the availability-guaranteed service function chain (SFC) provisioning, which considers the availability of each component to constitute an SFC, including links and VNFs. Unlike conventional protection models providing certain protection for the whole chain, the proposed model configures sub-chains for each SFC and provides proper protection for each sub-chain to achieve the required availability cost-efficiently. We formulate the proposed model as an optimization problem to minimize the deployment cost. A heuristic is presented to tackle the problem. The numerical results show that the proposed model outperforms the conventional ones in terms of deployment cost.